Fish Consumption In Bolivia

Since Bolivia is a landlocked country, the traditional diet of its inhabitants is not usually characterized by the use of fish, especially if we compare it with other Latin American countries. In fact, Bolivia is one of the countries with the lowest per capita fish consumption in the region. It is estimated that every Bolivian eats an average of 2Kg of this food per year (10,000ton consumed throughout the whole country), when the average for Latin America is 9Kg and the minimum recommended is 12Kg (Wiefels, 2006).

This situation occurs despite the fact that 65.9% of the Bolivian territory belongs to the world’s larger watershed (the Amazon basin) by having between its frontiers the basin of the rivers Beni and Mamoré. Actually, the Amazon fish

According to a research conducted by FAO in 2011, the average consumption within the local people of the Amazon is 109g per capita per day, which implies an annual per capita value of 40Kg (almost 20 times the national value) (Camburn, 2011). Also, unlike the rest of the country, fish is the second most important source of protein (after hunting meat) in most of these Amazon villages and even the first one in some communities in the department of Pando at the north end of Bolivia (Guerrero,

Before the amalgamation with mercury, detergent is used to remove organic constituents by washing intensively the fine fraction of the particles. The mercury excess is separated from the amalgam just by hand pressing, in most of the cases (Maurice-Bourgoin et al., 1997).

Nevertheless, Veiga et al., (2006) explains that mercury wetting of gold is not actually a real alloying process, but a “moderate deep sorption which involves some interpenetration of the two elements”. Since mercury's surface tension is less than gold but greater than water, “it adsorbs onto the surface of gold particles. In addition, mercury acts as a dense medium; gold sinks into the mercury while the lighter gangue material floats above. The solubility of gold in mercury is only 0.06% at 20°C”.

Telmer et al., (2009) explicates that artisanal gold mining releases mercury in to the environment in different